The Wall Street Journal picks Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump by Tevi Troy as one of the best political books of the year.
“Leaking reached new levels during the Trump administration, but strategic and malicious leaking is an old White House tradition. Leaking, as Mr. Troy explains it, can be a kind of art form. The trick is to avoid blame for the leak and, if possible, to make it look as though somebody else did it.”
“I was delighted to learn, for example, that when leakers in the first Bush administration wanted to speak to the press without authorization, they would drop in unusual words—’inchoate,’ say—in order to sound like the aforementioned Darman, then Treasury secretary. In the Reagan White House, leakers tried to implicate Chief of Staff Donald Regan by using the phrase ‘and the like,’ a favorite of Regan. Mr. Troy’s book, at once a serious history of executive-branch policymaking and a droll chronicle of White House bickering and backstabbing, may be just the thing to read at a time when so little in our politics is either serious or funny.”
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